[RSCT] Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years

[S. Kashdan]

The article below is a truly great story about the multiple positive 
influences resulting from a good teacher using a teachable moment...



Excerpt:



"It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was 13, 
a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in 
Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a 
concept that was familiar then in sociology, William F. Ogburn's notion of 
"cultural lag."



"The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much 
further and faster in human social-historical evolution than other aspects 
of culture: our institutions of government, our values, habits, our 
understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very notion of 
"progress" referred mainly to technology. What "lagged" behind, what 
developed more slowly or not at all in social adaptation to new technology 
was everything that bore on our ability to control and direct technology and 
the use of technology to dominate other humans.



"To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in technology 
that might be realized soon. It was possible now, he told us, to conceive of 
a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium, which would have an explosive 
power 1,000 times greater than the largest bombs being used in the war that 
was then going on. German scientists in late 1938 had discovered that 
uranium could be split by nuclear fission, in a way that would release 
immense amounts of energy.



"Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and 
specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in magazines like The 
Saturday Evening Post. None of these represented leaks from the Manhattan 
Project, whose very existence was top-secret. In every case they had been 
inspired by earlier articles on the subject that had been published freely 
in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self-censorship and then formal 
classification had set in. Patterson had come across one of these wartime 
articles. He brought the potential development to us as an example of one 
more possible leap by science and technology ahead of our social 
institutions.



"Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the 
possibility of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be the 
probable implications of this for humanity? How would it be used, by humans 
and states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the 
world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We 
were to write a short essay on this, within a week.



"I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for 
a few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the 
same judgment. It seemed pretty obvious."



SK



Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years



By Daniel Ellsberg



Truthdig, Posted on August 6, 2009



http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141822



It was a hot August day in Detroit. I was standing on a street corner 
downtown, looking at the front page of The Detroit News in a news rack. I 
remember a streetcar rattling by on the tracks as I read the headline: A 
single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought was 
that I knew exactly what that bomb was. It was the U-235 bomb we had 
discussed in school and written papers about, the previous fall.



I thought: "We got it first. And we used it. On a city."



I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very ominous for humanity 
had just happened. A feeling, new to me as an American, at 14, that my 
country might have made a terrible mistake. I was glad when the war ended 
nine days later, but it didn't make me think that my first reaction on Aug. 
6 was wrong.



Unlike nearly everyone else outside the Manhattan Project, my first 
awareness of the challenges of the nuclear era had occurred -and my 
attitudes toward the advent of nuclear weaponry had formed -some nine months 
earlier than those headlines, and in a crucially different context.



It was in a ninth-grade social studies class in the fall of 1944. I was 13, 
a boarding student on full scholarship at Cranbrook, a private school in 
Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Our teacher, Bradley Patterson, was discussing a 
concept that was familiar then in sociology, William F. Ogburn's notion of 
"cultural lag."



The idea was that the development of technology regularly moved much further 
and faster in human social-historical evolution than other aspects of 
culture: our institutions of government, our values, habits, our 
understanding of society and ourselves. Indeed, the very notion of 
"progress" referred mainly to technology. What "lagged" behind, what 
developed more slowly or not at all in social adaptation to new technology 
was everything that bore on our ability to control and direct technology and 
the use of technology to dominate other humans.



To illustrate this, Mr. Patterson posed a potential advance in technology 
that might be realized soon. It was possible now, he told us, to conceive of 
a bomb made of U-235, an isotope of uranium, which would have an explosive 
power 1,000 times greater than the largest bombs being used in the war that 
was then going on. German scientists in late 1938 had discovered that 
uranium could be split by nuclear fission, in a way that would release 
immense amounts of energy.



Several popular articles about the possibility of atomic bombs and 
specifically U-235 bombs appeared during the war in magazines like The 
Saturday Evening Post. None of these represented leaks from the Manhattan 
Project, whose very existence was top-secret. In every case they had been 
inspired by earlier articles on the subject that had been published freely 
in 1939 and 1940, before scientific self-censorship and then formal 
classification had set in. Patterson had come across one of these wartime 
articles. He brought the potential development to us as an example of one 
more possible leap by science and technology ahead of our social 
institutions.



Suppose, then, that one nation, or several, chose to explore the possibility 
of making this into a bomb, and succeeded. What would be the probable 
implications of this for humanity? How would it be used, by humans and 
states as they were today? Would it be, on balance, bad or good for the 
world? Would it be a force for peace, for example, or for destruction? We 
were to write a short essay on this, within a week.



I recall the conclusions I came to in my paper after thinking about it for a 
few days. As I remember, everyone in the class had arrived at much the same 
judgment. It seemed pretty obvious.



The existence of such a bomb -we each concluded -would be bad news for 
humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not 
control it, safely, appropriately. The power would be "abused": used 
dangerously and destructively, with terrible consequences. Many cities would 
be destroyed entirely, just as the Allies were doing their best to destroy 
German cities without atomic bombs at that very time, just as the Germans 
earlier had attempted to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps 
our species, would be in danger of destruction.



It was just too powerful. Bad enough that bombs already existed that could 
destroy a whole city block. They were called "block-busters": 10 tons of 
high explosive. Humanity didn't need the prospect of bombs a thousand times 
more powerful, bombs that could destroy whole cities.



As I recall, this conclusion didn't depend mainly on who had the Bomb, or 
how many had it, or who got it first. And to the best of my memory, we in 
the class weren't addressing it as something that might come so soon as to 
bear on the outcome of the ongoing war. It seemed likely, the way the case 
was presented to us, that the Germans would get it first, since they had 
done the original science. But we didn't base our negative assessment on the 
idea that this would necessarily be a Nazi or German bomb. It would be a bad 
development, on balance, even if democratic countries got it first.



After we turned in our papers and discussed them in class, it was months 
before I thought of the issues again. I remember the moment when I did, on a 
street corner in Detroit. I can still see and feel the scene and recall my 
thoughts, described above, as I read the headline on Aug. 6.



I remember that I was uneasy, on that first day and in the days ahead, about 
the tone in President Harry Truman's voice on the radio as he exulted over 
our success in the race for the Bomb and its effectiveness against Japan. I 
generally admired Truman, then and later, but in hearing his announcements I 
was put off by the lack of concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of 
tragedy, of desperation or fear for the future. It seemed to me that this 
was a decision best made in anguish; and both Truman's manner and the tone 
of the official communiques made unmistakably clear that this hadn't been 
the case.



Which meant for me that our leaders didn't have the picture, didn't grasp 
the significance of the precedent they had set and the sinister implications 
for the future. And that evident unawareness was itself scary. I believed 
that something ominous had happened; that it was bad for humanity that the 
Bomb was feasible, and that its use would have bad long-term consequences, 
whether or not those negatives were balanced or even outweighed by short-run 
benefits.



Looking back, it seems clear to me my reactions then were right.



Moreover, reflecting on two related themes that have run through my life 
since then -intense abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and more generally of 
killing women and children -I've come to suspect that I've conflated in my 
emotional memory two events less than a year apart: Hiroshima and a 
catastrophe that visited my own family 11 months later.



On the Fourth of July, 1946, driving on a hot afternoon on a flat, straight 
road through the cornfields of Iowa -on the way from Detroit to visit our 
relatives in Denver -my father fell asleep at the wheel and went off the 
road long enough to hit a sidewall over a culvert that sheared off the right 
side of the car, killing my mother and sister.



My father's nose was broken and his forehead was cut. When a highway patrol 
car came by, he was wandering by the wreckage, bleeding and dazed. I was 
inside, in a coma from a concussion, with a large gash on the left side of 
my forehead. I had been sitting on the floor next to the back seat, on a 
suitcase covered with a blanket, with my head just behind the driver's seat. 
When the car hit the wall, my head was thrown against a metal fixture on the 
back of the driver's seat, knocking me out and opening up a large triangular 
flap of flesh on my forehead. I was in coma for 36 hours. My legs had been 
stretched out in front of me across the car and my right leg was broken just 
above the knee.



My father had been a highway engineer in Nebraska. He said that highway 
walls should never have been flush with the road like that, and later laws 
tended to ban that placement. This one took off the side of the car where my 
mother and sister were sitting, my sister looking forward and my mother 
facing left with her back to the side of the car. My brother, who came to 
the scene from Detroit, said later that when he saw what was left of the car 
in a junkyard, the right side looked like steel wool. It was amazing that 
anyone had survived.



My understanding of how that event came about -it wasn't entirely an 
accident, as I heard from my father, that he had kept driving when he was 
exhausted -and how it affected my life is a story for another time. But 
looking back now, at what I drew from reading the Pentagon Papers later and 
on my citizen's activism since then, I think I saw in the events of August 
1945 and July 1946, unconsciously, a common message. I loved my father, and 
I respected Truman. But you couldn't rely entirely on a trusted 
authority -no matter how well-intentioned he was, however much you admired 
him -to protect you, and your family, from disaster. You couldn't safely 
leave events entirely to the care of authorities. Some vigilance was called 
for, to awaken them if need be or warn others. They could be asleep at the 
wheel, heading for a wall or a cliff. I saw that later in Lyndon Johnson and 
in his successor, and I've seen it since.



But I sensed almost right away, in August 1945 as Hiroshima and Nagasaki 
were incinerated, that such feelings -about our president, and our 
Bomb -separated me from nearly everyone around me, from my parents and 
friends and from most other Americans. They were not to be mentioned. They 
could only sound unpatriotic. And in World War II, that was about the last 
way one wanted to sound. These were thoughts to be kept to myself.



Unlikely thoughts for a 14-year-old American boy to have had the week the 
war ended? Yes, if he hadn't been in Mr. Patterson's social studies class 
the previous fall. Every member of that class must have had the same flash 
of recognition of the Bomb, as they read the August headlines during our 
summer vacation. Beyond that, I don't know whether they responded as I did, 
in the terms of our earlier discussion.



But neither our conclusions then or reactions like mine on Aug. 6 stamped us 
as gifted prophets. Before that day perhaps no one in the public outside our 
class -no one else outside the Manhattan Project (and very few inside 
it) -had spent a week, as we had, or even a day thinking about the impact of 
such a weapon on the long-run prospects for humanity.



And we were set apart from our fellow Americans in another important way. 
Perhaps no others outside the project or our class ever had occasion to 
think about the Bomb without the strongly biasing positive associations that 
accompanied their first awareness in August 1945 of its very possibility: 
that it was "our" weapon, an instrument of American democracy developed to 
deter a Nazi Bomb, pursued by two presidents, a war-winning weapon and a 
necessary one -so it was claimed and almost universally believed -to end the 
war without a costly invasion of Japan.



Unlike nearly all the others who started thinking about the new nuclear era 
after Aug. 6, our attitudes of the previous fall had not been shaped, or 
warped, by the claim and appearance that such a weapon had just won a war 
for the forces of justice, a feat that supposedly would otherwise have cost 
a million American lives (and as many or more Japanese).



For nearly all other Americans, whatever dread they may have felt about the 
long-run future of the Bomb (and there was more expression of this in elite 
media than most people remembered later) was offset at the time and ever 
afterward by a powerful aura of its legitimacy, and its almost miraculous 
potential for good which had already been realized. For a great many 
Americans still, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are regarded above all 
with gratitude, for having saved their own lives or the lives of their 
husbands, brothers, fathers or grandfathers, which would otherwise have been 
at risk in the invasion of Japan. For these Americans and many others, the 
Bomb was not so much an instrument of massacre as a kind of savior, a 
protector of precious lives.



Most Americans ever since have seen the destruction of the populations of 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary and effective -as constituting just 
means, in effect just terrorism, under the supposed circumstances -thus 
legitimating, in their eyes, the second and third largest single-day 
massacres in history. (The largest, also by the U.S. Army Air Corps, was the 
firebombing of Tokyo five months before on the night of March 9, which 
burned alive or suffocated 80,000 to 120,000 civilians. Most of the very few 
Americans who are aware of this event at all accept it, too, as appropriate 
in wartime.)



To regard those acts as definitely other than criminal and immoral -as most 
Americans do -is to believe that anything -anything -can be legitimate 
means: at worst, a necessary, lesser, evil. At least, if done by Americans, 
on the order of a president, during wartime. Indeed, we are the only country 
in the world that believes it won a war by bombing -specifically by bombing 
cities with weapons of mass destruction -and believes that it was fully 
rightful in doing so. It is a dangerous state of mind.



Even if the premises of these justifications had been realistic (after years 
of study I'm convinced, along with many scholars, that they were not; but 
I'm not addressing that here), the consequences of such beliefs for 
subsequent policymaking were bound to be fateful. They underlie the American 
government and public's ready acceptance ever since of basing our security 
on readiness to carry out threats of mass annihilation by nuclear weapons, 
and the belief by many officials and elites still today that abolition of 
these weapons is not only infeasible but undesirable.



By contrast, given a few days' reflection in the summer of 1945 before a 
presidential fait accompli was framed in that fashion, you didn't have to be 
a moral prodigy to arrive at the sense of foreboding we all had in Mr. 
Patterson's class. It was as easily available to 13-year-old ninth-graders 
as it was to many Manhattan Project scientists, who also had the opportunity 
to form their judgments before the Bomb was used.



But the scientists knew something else that was unknown to the public and 
even to most high-level decision-makers. They knew that the atomic bombs, 
the uranium and plutonium fission bombs they were preparing, were only the 
precursors to far more powerful explosives, almost surely including a 
thermonuclear fusion bomb, later called the hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb. That 
weapon -of which we eventually came to have tens of thousands -could have an 
explosive yield much greater than the fission bombs needed to trigger it. A 
thousand times greater.



Moreover, most of the scientists who focused on the long-run implications of 
nuclear weapons, belatedly, after the surrender of Germany in May 1945 
believed that using the Bomb against Japan would make international control 
of the weapon very unlikely. In turn that would make inevitable a desperate 
arms race, which would soon expose the United States to adversaries' 
uncontrolled possession of thermonuclear weapons, so that, as the scientists 
said in a pre-attack petition to the president, "the cities of the United 
States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger 
of sudden annihilation." (In this they were proved correct.) They cautioned 
the president-on both moral grounds and considerations of long-run survival 
of civilization-against beginning this process by using the Bomb against 
Japan even if its use might shorten the war.



But their petition was sent "through channels" and was deliberately held 
back by Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. It never got 
to the president, or even to Secretary of War Henry Stimson until after the 
Bomb had been dropped. There is no record that the scientists' concerns 
about the future and their judgment of a nuclear attack's impact on it were 
ever made known to President Truman before or after his decisions. Still 
less, made known to the American public.



At the end of the war the scientists' petition and their reasoning were 
reclassified secret to keep it from public knowledge, and its existence was 
unknown for more than a decade. Several Manhattan Project scientists later 
expressed regret that they had earlier deferred to the demands of the 
secrecy managers -for fear of losing their clearances and positions, and 
perhaps facing prosecution -and had collaborated in maintaining public 
ignorance on this most vital of issues.



One of them -Eugene Rabinowitch, who after the war founded and edited the 
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (with its Doomsday Clock) -had in fact, 
after the German surrender in May, actively considered breaking ranks and 
alerting the American public to the existence of the Bomb, the plans for 
using it against Japan, and the scientists' views both of the moral issues 
and the long-term dangers of doing so.



He first reported this in a letter to The New York Times published on June 
28, 1971. It was the day I submitted to arrest at the federal courthouse in 
Boston; for 13 days previous, my wife and I had been underground, eluding 
the FBI while distributing the Pentagon Papers to 17 newspapers after 
injunctions had halted publication in the Times and The Washington Post. The 
Rabinowitch letter began by saying it was "the revelation by The Times of 
the Pentagon history of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, despite its 
classification as 'secret' " that led him now to reveal:



"Before the atom bomb-drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had spent sleepless 
nights thinking that I should reveal to the American people, perhaps through 
a reputable news organ, the fateful act -the first introduction of atomic 
weapons -which the U.S. Government planned to carry out without consultation 
with its people. Twenty-five years later, I feel I would have been right if 
I had done so."



I didn't see this the morning it was published, because I was getting myself 
arrested and arraigned, for doing what Rabinowitch wishes he had done in 
1945, and I wish I had done in 1964. I first came across this extraordinary 
confession by a would-be whistle-blower (I don't know another like it) in 
"Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial" by Robert Jay Lifton and Greg 
Mitchell (New York, 1995, p. 249).



Rereading Rabinowitch's statement, still with some astonishment, I agree 
with him. He was right to consider it, and he would have been right if he 
had done it. He would have faced prosecution and prison then (as I did at 
the time his letter was published), but he would have been more than 
justified, as a citizen and as a human being, in informing the American 
public and burdening them with shared responsibility for the fateful 
decision.



Some of the same scientists faced a comparable challenge four years after 
Hiroshima, addressing the possible development of an even more terrible 
weapon, more fraught with possible danger to human survival: the hydrogen 
bomb. This time some who had urged use of the atom bomb against Japan 
(dissenting from the petitioners above) recommended against even development 
and testing of the new proposal, in view of its "extreme dangers to 
mankind." "Let it be clearly realized," they said, "that this is a super 
weapon; it is in a totally different category from an atomic bomb" (Herbert 
York, "The Advisors" [California, 1976], p. 156).



Once more, as I learned much later, knowledge of the secret possibility was 
not completely limited to government scientists. A few others -my father, it 
turns out, was one -knew of this prospect before it had received the stamp 
of presidential approval and had become an American government project. And 
once again, under those conditions of prior knowledge (denied as before to 
the public), to grasp the moral and long-run dangers you didn't have to be a 
nuclear physicist. My father was not.



Some background is needed here. My father, Harry Ellsberg, was a structural 
engineer. He worked for Albert Kahn in Detroit, the "Arsenal of Democracy." 
At the start of the Second World War, he was the chief structural engineer 
in charge of designing the Ford Willow Run plant, a factory to make B-24 
Liberator bombers for the Air Corps. (On June 1 this year, GM, now owner, 
announced it would close the plant as part of its bankruptcy proceedings.)



Dad was proud of the fact that it was the world's largest industrial 
building under one roof. It put together bombers the way Ford produced cars, 
on an assembly line. The assembly line was a mile and a quarter long.



My father told me that it had ended up L-shaped, instead of in a straight 
line as he had originally designed it. When the site was being prepared, 
Ford comptrollers noted that the factory would run over a county line, into 
an adjacent county where the company had less control and local taxes were 
higher. So the design, for the assembly line and the factory housing it, had 
to be bent at right angles to stay inside Ford country.



Once, my father took me out to Willow Run to see the line in operation. For 
as far as I could see, the huge metal bodies of planes were moving along 
tracks as workers riveted and installed parts. It was like pictures I had 
seen of steer carcasses in a Chicago slaughterhouse. But as Dad had 
explained to me, three-quarters of a mile along, the bodies were moved off 
the tracks onto a circular turntable that rotated them 90 degrees; then they 
were moved back on track for the last half mile of the L. Finally, the 
planes were rolled out the hangar doors at the end of the factory -one every 
hour: It took 59 minutes on the line to build a plane with its 100,000 parts 
from start to finish -filled with gas and flown out to war.



It was an exciting sight for a 13-year-old. I was proud of my father. His 
next wartime job had been to design a still larger airplane engine 
factory -- again the world's largest plant under one roof -the Dodge Chicago 
plant, which made all the engines for B-29s.



When the war ended, Dad accepted an offer to oversee the buildup of the 
plutonium production facilities at Hanford, Wash. That project was being run 
by General Electric under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission. To 
take the job of chief structural engineer on the project, Dad moved from the 
engineering firm of Albert Kahn, where he had worked for years, to what 
became Giffels & Rossetti. Later he told me that engineering firm had the 
largest volume of construction contracts in the world at that time, and his 
project was the world's largest. I grew up hearing these superlatives.



The Hanford project gave my father his first really good salary. But while I 
was away as a sophomore at Harvard, he left his job with Giffels & Rossetti, 
for reasons I never learned at the time. He was out of work for almost a 
year. Then he went back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. 
Almost 30 years later, in 1978, when my father was 89, I happened to ask him 
why he had left Giffels & Rossetti. His answer startled me.



He said, "Because they wanted me to help build the H-bomb."



This was a breathtaking statement for me to hear in 1978. I was in full-time 
active opposition to the deployment of the neutron bomb -which was a small 
H-bomb -that President Jimmy Carter was proposing to send to Europe. The 
N-bomb had a killing radius from its output of neutrons that was much wider 
than its radius of destruction by blast. Optimally, an airburst N-bomb would 
have little fallout nor would it destroy structures, equipment or vehicles, 
but its neutrons would kill the humans either outside or within buildings or 
tanks. The Soviets mocked it as "a capitalist weapon" that destroyed people 
but not property; but they tested such a weapon too, as did other countries.



I had opposed developing or testing that concept for almost 20 years, since 
it was first described to me by my friend and colleague at the RAND Corp., 
Sam Cohen, who liked to be known as the "father of the neutron bomb." I 
feared that, as a "small" weapon with limited and seemingly controllable 
lethal effects, it would be seen as usable in warfare, making U.S. first use 
and "limited nuclear war" more likely. It would be the match that would set 
off an exchange of the much larger, dirty weapons which were the bulk of our 
arsenal and were all that the Soviets then had.



In the year of this conversation with Dad, I was arrested four times 
blocking the railroad tracks at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production 
Facility, which produced all the plutonium triggers for H-bombs and was 
going to produce the plutonium cores for neutron bombs. One of these arrests 
was on Nagasaki Day, Aug. 9. The "triggers" produced at Rocky Flats were, in 
effect, the nuclear components of A-bombs, plutonium fission bombs of the 
type that had destroyed Nagasaki on that date in 1945.



Every one of our many thousands of H-bombs, the thermonuclear fusion bombs 
that arm our strategic forces, requires a Nagasaki-type A-bomb as its 
detonator. (I doubt that one American in a hundred knows that simple fact, 
and thus has a clear understanding of the difference between Aand H-bombs, 
or of the reality of the thermonuclear arsenals of the last 50 years.



Our popular image of nuclear war -from the familiar pictures of the 
devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima -is grotesquely misleading. Those 
pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit 
by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.



The plutonium for these weapons came from Hanford and from the Savannah 
River Site in Georgia and was machined into weapons components at Rocky 
Flats, in Colorado. Allen Ginsberg and I, with many others, blockaded the 
entrances to the plant on Aug. 9, 1978, to interrupt business as usual on 
the anniversary of the day a plutonium bomb had killed 58,000 humans (about 
100,000 had died by the end of 1945).



I had never heard before of any connection of my father with the H-bomb. He 
wasn't particularly wired in to my anti-nuclear work or to any of my 
activism since the Vietnam War had ended. I asked him what he meant by his 
comment about leaving Giffels & Rossetti.



"They wanted me to be in charge of designing a big plant that would be 
producing material for an H-bomb." He said that DuPont, which had built the 
Hanford Site, was to have the contract from the Atomic Energy Commission. 
That would have been for the Savannah River Site. I asked him when this was.



"Late '49."



I told him, "You must have the date wrong. You couldn't have heard about the 
hydrogen bomb then, it's too early." I'd just been reading about that, in 
Herb York's recent book, "The Advisors." The General Advisory Committee 
(GAC) of the AEC -chaired by Robert Oppenheimer and including James Conant, 
Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi -were considering that fall whether or not to 
launch a crash program for an H-bomb. That was the "super weapon" referred 
to earlier. They had advised strongly against it, but President Truman 
overruled them.



"Truman didn't make the decision to go ahead till January 1950. Meanwhile 
the whole thing was super-secret. You couldn't have heard about it in '49."



My father said, "Well, somebody had to design the plant if they were going 
to go ahead. I was the logical person. I was in charge of the structural 
engineering of the whole project at Hanford after the war. I had a Q 
clearance."



That was the first I'd ever heard that he'd had had a Q clearance -an AEC 
clearance for nuclear weapons design and stockpile data. I'd had that 
clearance myself in the Pentagon -along with close to a dozen other special 
clearances above top-secret -after I left the RAND Corp. for the Defense 
Department in 1964. It was news to me that my father had had a clearance, 
but it made sense that he would have needed one for Hanford.



I said, "So you're telling me that you would have been one of the only 
people in the country, outside the GAC, who knew we were considering 
building the H-bomb in 1949?"



He said, "I suppose so. Anyway, I know it was late '49, because that's when 
I quit."



"Why did you quit?"



"I didn't want to make an H-bomb. Why, that thing was going to be 1,000 
times more powerful than the A-bomb!"



I thought, score one for his memory at 89. He remembered the proportion 
correctly. That was the same factor Oppenheimer and the others predicted in 
their report in 1949. They were right. The first explosion of a true H-bomb, 
five years later, had a thousand times the explosive power of the Hiroshima 
blast.



At 15 megatons -the equivalent of 15 million tons of high explosive -it was 
over a million times more powerful than the largest conventional bombs of 
World War II. That one bomb had almost eight times the explosive force of 
all the bombs we dropped in that war: more than all the explosions in all 
the wars in human history. In 1961, the Soviets tested a 58-megaton H-bomb.



My father went on: "I hadn't wanted to work on the A-bomb, either. But then 
Einstein seemed to think that we needed it, and it made sense to me that we 
had to have it against the Russians. So I took the job, but I never felt 
good about it.



"Then when they told me they were going to build a bomb 1,000 times bigger, 
that was it for me. I went back to my office and I said to my deputy, 'These 
guys are crazy. They have an A-bomb, now they want an H-bomb. They're going 
to go right through the alphabet till they have a Z-bomb.' "



I said, "Well, so far they've only gotten up to N."



He said, "There was another thing about it that I couldn't stand. Building 
these things generated a lot of radioactive waste. I wasn't responsible for 
designing the containers for the waste, but I knew they were bound to leak 
eventually. That stuff was deadly forever. It was radioactive for 24,000 
years."



Again he had turned up a good figure. I said, "Your memory is working pretty 
well. It would be deadly a lot longer than that, but that's about the 
half-life of plutonium."



There were tears in his eyes. He said huskily, "I couldn't stand the thought 
that I was working on a project that was poisoning parts of my own country 
forever, that might make parts of it uninhabitable for thousands of years."



I thought over what he'd said; then I asked him if anyone else working with 
him had had misgivings. He didn't know.



"Were you the only one who quit?" He said yes. He was leaving the best job 
he'd ever had, and he didn't have any other to turn to. He lived on savings 
for a while and did some consulting.



I thought about Oppenheimer and Conant -both of whom had recommended 
dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima -and Fermi and Rabi, who had, that 
same month Dad was resigning, expressed internally their opposition to 
development of the superbomb in the most extreme terms possible: It was 
potentially "a weapon of genocide ... carries much further than the atomic 
bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations ... whose power 
of destruction is essentially unlimited ... a threat to the future of the 
human race which is intolerable ... a danger to humanity as a whole ... 
necessarily an evil thing considered in any light" (York, "The Advisor," pp. 
155-159).



Not one of these men risked his clearance by sharing his anxieties and the 
basis for them with the American public. Oppenheimer and Conant considered 
resigning their advisory positions when the president went ahead against 
their advice. But they were persuaded-by Dean Acheson-not to quit at that 
time, lest that draw public attention to their expert judgment that the 
president's course fatally endangered humanity.



I asked my father what had made him feel so strongly, to act in a way that 
nobody else had done. He said, "You did."



That didn't make any sense. I said, "What do you mean? We didn't discuss 
this at all. I didn't know anything about it."



Dad said, "It was earlier. I remember you came home with a book one day, and 
you were crying. It was about Hiroshima. You said, 'Dad, you've got to read 
this. It's the worst thing I've ever read.' "



I said that must have been John Hersey's book "Hiroshima." (I read it when 
it came out as a book. I was in the hospital when it filled The New Yorker 
in August 1946.) I didn't remember giving it to him.



"Yes. Well, I read it, and you were right. That's when I started to feel bad 
about working on an atomic bomb project. And then when they said they wanted 
me to work on a hydrogen bomb, it was too much for me. I thought it was time 
for me to get out."



I asked if he had told his bosses why he was quitting. He said he told some 
people, not others. The ones he told seemed to understand his feelings. In 
fact, in less than a year, the head of the firm called to say that they 
wanted him to come back as chief structural engineer for the whole firm. 
They were dropping the DuPont contract (they didn't say why), so he wouldn't 
have to have anything to do with the AEC or bomb-making. He stayed with them 
till he retired.



I said, finally, "Dad, how could I not ever have heard any of this before? 
How come you never said anything about it?"



My father said, "Oh, I couldn't tell any of this to my family. You weren't 
cleared."



Well, I finally got my clearances, a decade after my father gave his up. And 
for some years, they were my undoing, though they turned out to be useful in 
the end. A decade later they allowed me to read the Pentagon Papers and to 
keep them in my "Top Secret" safe at the RAND Corp., from which I eventually 
delivered them to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later to 19 
newspapers.



We have long needed and lacked the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers on the 
subject of nuclear policies and preparations, nuclear threats and 
decision-making: above all in the United States and Russia but also in the 
other nuclear-weapons states. I deeply regret that I did not make known to 
Congress, the American public and the world the extensive documentation of 
persistent and still-unknown nuclear dangers that was available to me 40 to 
50 years ago as a consultant to and official in the executive branch working 
on nuclear war plans, command and control and nuclear crises. Those in 
nuclear-weapons states who are in a position now to do more than I did then 
to alert their countries and the world to fatally reckless secret policies 
should take warning from the earlier inaction of myself and others: and do 
better.



That I had high-level access and played such a role in nuclear planning is, 
of course, deeply ironic in view of the personal history recounted above. My 
feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed 
an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the 
overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of 
nuclear war.



There was a close analogy with the Manhattan Project. Its scientists -most 
of whom hoped the Bomb would never be used for anything but as a threat to 
deter Germany -were driven by a plausible but mistaken fear that the Nazis 
were racing them. Actually the Nazis had rejected the pursuit of the atomic 
bomb on practical grounds in June 1942, just as the Manhattan Project was 
beginning. Similarly, I was one of many in the late '50s who were misled and 
recruited into the nuclear arms race by exaggerated, and in this case 
deliberately manipulated, fears of Soviet intentions and crash efforts.



Precisely because I did receive clearances and was exposed to top-secret 
intelligence estimates, in particular from the Air Force, I, along with my 
colleagues at the RAND Corp., came to be preoccupied with the urgency of 
averting nuclear war by deterring a Soviet surprise attack that would 
exploit an alleged "missile gap." That supposed dangerous U.S. inferiority 
was exactly as unfounded in reality as the fear of the Nazi crash bomb 
program had been, or, to pick a more recent example, as concern over Saddam 
Hussein's supposed WMDs and nuclear pursuit in 2003.



Working conscientiously, obsessively, on a wrong problem, countering an 
illusory threat, I and my colleagues distracted ourselves and helped 
distract others from dealing with real dangers posed by the mutual and 
spreading possession of nuclear weapons -dangers which we were helping make 
worse -and from real opportunities to make the world more secure. 
Unintentionally, yet inexcusably, we made our country and the world less 
safe.



Eventually the Soviets did emulate us in creating a world-threatening 
nuclear capability on hair-trigger alert. That still exists; Russian nuclear 
posture and policies continue, along with ours, to endanger our countries, 
civilization and much of life itself. But the persistent reality has been 
that the nuclear arms race has been driven primarily by American initiatives 
and policies and that every major American decision in this 64-year-old 
nuclear era has been accompanied by unwarranted concealment, deliberate 
obfuscation, and official and public delusions.



I have believed for a long time that official secrecy and deceptions about 
our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences 
have threatened the survival of the human species. To understand the urgency 
of radical changes in our nuclear policies that may truly move the world 
toward abolition of nuclear weapons, we need a new understanding of the real 
history of the nuclear age.



Using the new opportunities offered by the Internet -drawing attention to 
newly declassified documents and to some realities still concealed -I plan 
over the next year, before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, to do my part 
in unveiling this hidden history.